The potential for technology-enabled connections

UNDER DEVELOPMENTKids, education, and cellular handsets

Authors:
Jakkaphan Tangkuampien

In South Africa, perhaps not unlike in the rest of the world,
most parents find themselves unable to afford school fees for
their children. Yet a surprising observation that can readily be
made is that most students do have access to a cellular phone and
can make proficient use of the device. The explanation for this
oddity isn’t obvious, but the potential use of the cellular phone
already in the pocket of many school-going children is an
enticing prospect for those looking to improve the quality of
education. This is especially true in a country where the
school-leaving qualification program has a pass rate of only 60
percentthis with the definition of a pass as low as 30
percent for some subjects. The work reported in this article took
place with students who attend schools where class sizes are 40
to 60 and whose parents are not able to cover the full cost of
school fees and textbooks.

MXit

MXit (www.mxit.co.za) is a South Africabased instant
message service designed to run on almost every cellular phone
currently in use. The result is that most phones with at least
GPRS and Java capabilities can run a version of MXit allowing the
majority of cellular users access to a much cheaper chat platform
than the already popular SMStypically, a character sent by
MXit is one-thousandth the cost of a character sent by SMS. It is
no surprise then that this platform is popular with children of
all backgrounds: It allows them to chat with their friends
instantly and cheaply.

However, MXit is not uniformly welcome in schools. There have
been many sensationalist newspaper reports of MXit being used for
underhanded purposes. These reports are reminiscent of the early
days of the Web, when many negative stories circulated about the
potential harm it would inflict upon our children. Like the Web
before it, MXit has huge potential as a positive medium, and it
is our responsibility as technology designers and researchers to
leverage that potential.

MXit Interface

Many researchers have already commented on how the value of a
technology to a person will force them to overcome any hurdle as
prosaic as a poorly designed interface. To use MXit, users have
formidable tasks: The phone must be set up to use data services;
the interface is crammed onto the small screen, and it is often
impossible to see who sent the most recent message; there are
handset inconsistencies between how text is entered for an SMS
and how text is entered in the MXit client.

Despite these difficulties, MXit users have managed to learn
and use it to achieve their overall goal of
communicationwithin South Africa at the moment, the number
of MXit users is greater than the total number of landlines
installed in the entire country!

Like any new social network technology, MXit had a quiet
period before it gained sufficient traction to make it viable as
a communication tool. Viewed with frustration by adult users,
teenagers were spurred by the value proposition and persevered to
the point where almost every high school pupil in South Africa
with an appropriate handset has MXit installed.

MXit and Teenagers

When we started investigating ICT interventions in South
African high schools back in 2006, MXit was already highly
popular and seemed like a good infrastructure around which to
base our work. Primed by the press reports, we were worried about
the abuses of a social network composed almost entirely of
teenagers. However, when we started to interview the children, it
became clear that their friend lists were made up almost entirely
of friends from school. They treated those people whom they knew
only from MXit with suspicion, and the children were much more
guarded in their communication with these friends than they were
with the people they knew in real life. Showing that teenagers
are the same the world over (and across time periods, as well),
most of their conversations on MXit were about parties or how
their friends were doingjust a few hours after spending
all day with them at school. Many children reported that their
parents did not know how to use MXit, giving this medium an
exclusive feel and opening the way for conversations that could
be free from parental observation.

In order to further explore the potential of mobile ICT
systems in education, the principle researcher started work as an
IT teacher in a high school in South Africa. As part of this
exploration process, he registered as a MXit user. Most of the
students were surprised by his presence on MXit; some were
threatened by what they considered to be an invasion of their
space. This presents an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, we
want to use a technology the students are familiar with, one
they’re excited about using and that fits in with their daily
routine. But if our intervention leeches out their enjoyment of
MXit, then we will have ruined our relationship with the students
in destroying a technology they see as theirs.

MXit and Education

As an initial, tentative intervention, extracurricular support
sessions were offered via MXit. At first the students did not
make use of this facility for asking question on how to do an
assignments, instead they asked questions like “how are you?” and
“can you get me this girl’s number?”

After observing and interviewing the students about this
behavior, it became clear that they were upset that not only was
an adult invading their space but also that schoolwork was being
pushed into their social space. Moreover, some students reported
concern that their friends might notice they were communicating
with their teacher, which is “uncool.”

One unexpected observation was in relation to the latency in
the MXit system. To overcome this, most children have multiple
chat sessions running concurrently so that they have the
potential to get a message from one of the available
friendsdespite their legendary thumb-typing prowess,
replies from friends could take more than 20 seconds to be
delivered, which they deemed too long. However, some of the
students felt that they must maintain total focus while chatting
to the teacher about school. They felt that in talking to their
teachers it meant that teachers should be on the top of their
reply list, disrupting the way in which they normally
communicated.

The MXit Bots

The realization that students were responding purely out of
politeness, in a way that disrupted their normal use of the
system, led us to explore other uses for MXit in education. One
lead we pursued stemmed from the observation that MXit users
experienced a lot of delay in using the system. In fact,
depending on the particular child and the friends that were
online, up to 50 percent of conversation time could be spent
waiting. We therefore built a bot that would send information to
any user who sent it a blank message“bot” is the term for
any program participating in an online chat. The information
related to the material being taught in class.

The children started to “talk” to the bot whenever they were
waiting. As the bot could respond faster than any human, they
could use it to fill in the gaps in conversation time left by
their friends. Although the bot was clearly invading their social
space with school information, the students still kept using it.
It would seem that the relief from the tedium of waiting, which
the bot provided, was sufficient to overcome the fact that it was
sending nonsocial communications.

While it would be hard to prove any direct correlation between
the students’ receiving communication from the bot and their
grades improving, the system grew in popularity. In fact, the bot
started to be used by students from other schools. In the two
weeks preceding the final examinations, there were more requests
received than in the previous year. Clearly, the students
perceived the bot service to be beneficial.

After the examination period, we interviewed a number of the
students. Most of them felt that the service was useful and that
they would not have been able to answer some of the examination
questions without the information the bot provided. Whether or
not this is strictly true is hard to say, but it was clear the
bot had played some part in their motivation to learn. Having
seen this initial bot, the students were able to make suggestions
about services and features of future bots, which inspired us to
take the intervention further.

The potential use of the cellular phone
already in the pocket of many school-going children is an
enticing prospect for those looking to improve the quality of
education. This is especially true in a country where the
school-leaving qualification program has a pass rate of only 60
percent.

More Bots

The first new bot was the multiple-choice bot, which not only
asked questions related to the subject but also provided feedback
on both correct and incorrect answers. When the student answered
correctly, he or she received further information expanding the
concepts behind the question; an incorrect answer prompted an
explanation of why the answer was wrong.

Following up from there, we decided to expand the service by
introducing equation-solver, dictionary, and Wikipedia bots.

With the equation solver, students were able to type in a
quadratic equation to get a step-by-step guide on how to solve
that equation. The dictionary and Wikipedia bots are essentially
reference services; both allow students to follow up on words or
concepts they do not understand by using MXit as an interface to
online services.

The bots lend themselves well to content-based subjects. At
present we are using them in information technology and
mathematics, but we have not attempted to introduce bots to
support other subjects. Rather than attempt this translation
ourselves, we have instead been working with other teachers to
empower them to create their own bots to support the teaching of
their subjects. Our hope is to create a suite of bots that will
be accessible to anyone using MXit.

Reflection

Ostensibly, this project is about using a mobile chat service
(MXit) as an educational tool. However, as we develop and reflect
on the project, we realize there are more general lessons for
others trying to make effective ICT interventions in the
developing world.

Conceptualizing the Internet. For most of our
users, MXit is the Internet. They have no notion of sophisticated
Web applications and browsers; if it isn’t accessible through
MXit, it does not exist. If you are trying to reach users with a
new service, then we suggest you look at the ICT they are already
familiar with and use that to give them a hook into the new
system. It may be they use a system similar to MXit.

Local market forces. Within South Africa we have
relatively cheap data plans that are accessible to pay-as-you-go
customers as well as customers on contract. On current plans,
users can access data at 8 cents/Mb. Most customers can therefore
conduct all their communications for a few cents per day! It may
be that other countries have similar low-cost data plans, or
perhaps there are other low-cost ways of communicatingfor
example, populating voice mailboxes with information in response
to an SMS query.

The many handsets problem. Anyone who has tried
to do a wide-scale deployment of mobile applications will know
the headache involved in trying to write software that will run
on any platform. Had we attempted an intervention in the school
on our own, it would have been cheaper to buy the students
identical handsets rather than invest the programmer time to
create software for every handset the students have. Fortunately,
we could leverage the MXit infrastructure already in place.
Again, if MXit is not available, then it may be worth seeing how
much you can achieve with, say, a WAP interface before going the
painful route of creating your own client software.

Author

Jakkaphan Tangkuampien is working on his Ph.D. in computer
science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa under Gary
Marsden. He also teaches the subject of information technology to
high school students. His research interest is in exploring the
potential of mobile devices in education in the developing world
where computing devices are not as readily available.

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